I follow Bea through to the kitchen and she starts arranging the flowers, snipping the stems and running them under water as she starts chatting away. She doesn’t mention the whole Cecily Baby Shower Fiasco from the weekend, which I’m grateful for. Bea is a good listener. Sure, she is constantly shouting Don’t eat that/Don’t touch that/Get off that/Be nice to each other/Stop doing that/Don’t break that/Where have you put that piece of Lego? to her kids, but all whilst having a genuine conversation with me. Her ability to actually listen to her friends whilst maintaining her mad life is a real skill. She is like a dolphin: they sleep with one side of their brain wide open as a defence mechanism as they drift through the deep sea. A rare breed: a successful multitasker. She can genuinely talk with you on any topic and still have one side of her brain on kid-watch. Maybe she isn’t one hundred per cent present (who is?), but she isn’t like other mum friends who only pretend to be listening to me. Ah-hmm. Right. Oh yes. Oh poor you. Depression? Oh dear. Sounds nasty. One minute. While literally looking straight over my left shoulder at what the kids are doing. I get it, you have to keep them alive, but you also have to keep your friendships alive.

Bea places the flowers on the middle of her big wooden dining-room table in a large hand-painted vase. White, pink and yellow lilies, her favourites.

‘They look lovely. Thanks, Ol,’ Bea says, finessing the stems so they spread equally in the vase.

I brush my sleeve past them as I sit down at the table and get orange lily-pollen powder on my jumper. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ I mutter.

‘Don’t worry, I can get it out, just need a bit of sticky tape to lift it off. Just don’t rub it.’

‘Thanks … and well, thanks for not making a big deal of me being a dick at Cecily’s at the weekend,’ I say, after a sharp intake of breath.

‘Ah, it’s fine, you’re always a bit of a dick,’ Bea says, winking and rummaging around for sticky tape in a broken kitchen drawer.

‘But seriously, I don’t know what came over me. It felt like something was building up, and I snapped. And poor Cec got the brunt of it. I feel awful.’

‘It’s OK. I get it. It’s a strange time, Ol. We’re all going through some big changes, and it can feel scary,’ Bea says, carefully dabbing at my sleeve with tape.

‘Yeah. That must be it. I just feel very removed at the moment. A little lost,’ I say.

‘And you think Cecily has it all together?’ Bea asks, with an eyebrow raised.

‘Yeah I do. Cecily has it all together, and I don’t. So I said some things I didn’t mean.’

‘I think you have more things in common than you think, it’s just accepting that your situations are different. Cec definitely doesn’t feel like things are all together,’ Bea says.